How women over 40 are rewriting the script on sex, power and intimacy

In the intimate, unflinching series Dying for Sex, the body is both a battleground and a canvas. Based on the true story of Molly Kochan, a woman whose terminal cancer diagnosis sparks a radical sexual awakening, the show offers not just another tale of late-life liberation, but a provocative reframing of what female sexuality can look like when it is wrested from the jaws of patriarchy, illness and cultural neglect.

Molly, played with luminous vulnerability by Michelle Williams, doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of the dying woman trope – no slow fade into sanitised martyrdom. Instead, we see a woman breaking free. Leaving behind a marriage defined more by caretaking than connection, she embarks on an erotic journey that refuses to centre penetrative sex or romantic resolution. Her experiences are messy, playful and ritualistic. She explores kink, domination, emotional surrender – modalities of sex that hinge on trust and control, on power given and taken with intention. What emerges isn’t just titillating; it’s insurgent.

This narrative arrives at a moment when culture is beginning – tentatively and unevenly – to make space for the full spectrum of female sexual agency after 40. In the Nicole Kidman-starring film Babygirl, a married middle-aged woman’s foray into a DDLG (Daddy Dom/Little Girl) dynamic becomes a means of reparenting and reclamation, handled with striking tenderness. Miranda July’s novel All Fours, an avant-garde meditation on queer desire and bodily entropy, dares to ask what pleasure looks like when you stop performing it for someone else. Together, these works signal a shift away from the glossy, heteronormative, and youth-obsessed images of desire we’ve long been sold and toward stories that foreground interiority, complexity, and non-linear embodiment.

What’s radical in Dying for Sex is not just the sex, though the sex is radical, but the refusal to centre men, and the refusal to separate eroticism from the political terrain of the body. Molly’s cancer was misdiagnosed and her pain minimised by a male physician. It’s a narrative arc familiar to many women, especially those living in bodies that are ageing, disabled, or otherwise deemed inconvenient by a medical-industrial complex that still too often treats women’s testimonies as unreliable. Even her husband Steve (Jay Duplass) exerts a form of control and ownership over Molly’s illness, body, her very self. In the first episode, Steve repeatedly refers to Molly’s illness and treatment as “ours”, calling her doctor “our doctor” and repeatedly pathologising her, insisting that she doesn’t know her own mind. When, during couples counselling, Molly says she wants to have sex with Steve after he hasn’t touched her in three years, he refuses to acknowledge her desire and agency, dismissing it and mansplaining her own desires to her. “I don’t think this is actually what you want. I think you’re confused about what you want…this isn’t an authentic desire, it’s a side effect of the medication.” Her desire to perform oral sex on him is also pathologised as a side-effect of childhood trauma.

Under Steve’s control, Molly is reduced to a sick, traumatised woman who doesn’t know herself, while he gets to play the martyred caretaker who knows best. When Steve talks over her at a doctor’s appointment, Molly finally explodes. “It’s my life. It’s my death. It’s mine.” Refusing to let men dismiss her and dictate her life is the first step towards her life, completely on her own terms. On this journey, she explores various kinds of kink and transgressive sex, experiences that add fun, silliness, eroticism, discomfort, connections and ultimately healing to her final days. Molly’s turn toward erotic experimentation isn’t escapism; it’s revolt. She reclaims pleasure not as a distraction from death, but as a form of authorship over her remaining days. “I just want to feel things,” Molly tells Steve. And she does. She feels it all – the thrill and discomfort of new sexual exploration, the resurfaced pain and healing from a previous sexual assault, and an unexpected connection with her neighbour (Rob Delaney). And yet, the series’ most enduring love story is not sexual at all. It is the tender, co-dependent, fiercely funny friendship between Molly and Nikki (a heartwrenching Jenny Slate), who steps into the role of caregiver, witness and emotional anchor. Their intimacy is ungoverned by the usual rules of plot or patriarchy. It is capacious. This portrayal of female friendship as central, rather than secondary, to the erotic imagination is part of the show’s larger refusal: to accept that women’s stories must culminate in romantic closure, or that ageing is an automatic closing of the door to desire. Nikki is dramatic, tender, disorganised, messy, flawed and unwaveringly devoted to Molly. Watching Nikki both rise to and crumble under the weight of being Molly’s friend, sexual escapable supporter, platonic soulmate, committed caretaker and death doula is a stunning portrayal of love – and is remarkable because it is the story of female friendship. Studies have shown that when wives become sick, marriages are at an elevated risk of divorce, whereas there isn’t any relationship between divorce and husbands’ illness. When men get sick, women stay and care for them. But women get sick and many men leave. Dying For Sex shows what it means to love someone so much you’re willing to watch them die.

The show is funny and weird and emotional in all the best ways. Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock inject dark humour and emotional candour into every episode, trusting the audience to handle the tonal whiplash between, say, a hospice nurse explaining how dying bodies smell and a scene where a man is lovingly kicked in the groin. But it never feels cynical. If anything, the absurdity underscores just how little time we have to waste pretending we’re not scared, horny, or still healing from what happened to us decades ago.

What makes Dying for Sex stand out in an increasingly crowded field of “women over 40 reclaiming desire” stories – think Leo Grande, May/December, or Babygirl – is how clearly it shows that the real pursuit isn’t orgasm. It’s freedom. Molly’s desire to orgasm with a partner for the first time is not merely about sexual gratification; it’s about presence, control, and intimacy – three things her childhood abuser stole from her. Molly isn’t shown having penetrative vaginal sex, which is radical in a society that centres sex on penetration and the male orgasm. This decentring of male pleasure is radical in the sex, but the decentring of men in the show is also important. The male characters are not romanticised or even particularly developed. They’re obstacles, tools, mirrors, sometimes collateral damage. But they are not the point. The point is Molly’s healing, on her terms, in her time. That healing is messy, nonlinear and often fuelled by impulsive choices, but it’s never less than honest.

The way the show grapples with boundaries, consent, sex and empowerment is also wonderful. Molly is seen engaging with BDSM, sub/dom dynamics, role play – and it’s never pathologised. Molly kicks one man in the penis because it’s pleasurable for him, tells another that his (quite glorious) penis is pathetic because that’s what he enjoys, pretends to check a man for ticks when he dresses up as a dog.

Because Molly is entering into a new terrain of kink, because she has limitations and needs around her body, and because she’s trying to create a new sense of safety for herself, clear communication and consent is a must – and its portrayal is beautiful. Safe words are explored, the idea of “top-drop” and aftercare, a sexual partner stops a sexual interaction when he notices Molly disassociating because he doesn’t want to do anything she’s not fully present for and enthusiastic about. Everything is discussed and clear, modelling the type of consent and boundaries that is so often overlooked in portrayal of hetero vanilla sex, where everything is silent, assumed – and therefore, much less safe.

The sexual dynamics are sometimes funny, sometimes awkward, sometimes clumsy but are never pathologised or judged. “Is there anything else you want to try?” she asks the man who likes dressing up as a dog. “No judgment… There’s nothing wrong with you.” Molly embodies this lack of judgement, this pure curiosity and desire to explore what makes people feel safe and empowered – the very things her abuser took from her. When her palliative care social worker Sonya (the remarkable Esco Jouléy) reveals that they enjoy being hogtied, Molly asks “What does that feel like?” and Sonya replies “Thank you for not asking if it hurts” – a small moment acknowledging that people who enjoy sex and kink are tired of being pathologized for what they enjoy. Molly, who has spent her life being told who she is, what she wants, why she’s broken and damaged, has no interest in judging others. She wants to make them feel accepted, and to receive acceptance in return. She received that from many of her sexual partners, but the unconditional acceptance she receives comes from Nikki, who listens to Molly’s trauma, sees her at her worst, hears all about her sexual exploits, sees Molly be selfish as well as vulnerable and embraces it all. In a world where romantic love so often overshadows all other relationships in fiction, Dying for Sex centres platonic intimacy as the most enduring and life-affirming bond. Nikki is not just comic relief or a quirky sidekick – she is the witness and co-pilot to Molly’s journey. That her presence bookends Molly’s life, not a romantic partner, feels radical in its own quiet way.

Dying for Sex lands at a fascinating moment. Sex is having an odd cultural year – on one hand, Gen Z is reportedly having less sex; on the other, we’re in the middle of a MILF renaissance, and shows like this are finally asking older women not just to feel sexy, but to feel seen. The show is politically astute about sex without turning into a PSA. It acknowledges sexual trauma, body dysmorphia post-mastectomy, the infantilization of female patients by the medical system, and the fallibility of so-called male feminists, without losing its bite or sense of play. The show’s core insight is that women are taught to sublimate their needs for the sake of harmony, especially in marriage. What’s more radical than a woman choosing herself, even at the end of her life? And yet, even this act of self-liberation is complicated. Molly may flee her husband, but she does not escape pain, or grief, or the trauma wired into her nervous system. She doesn’t find closure; she finds fragments of peace.

For decades, popular media has consigned women over 40 to the sidelines of sexuality – mothers, martyrs, asexual oddities, or cougars clawing at youth. But Dying for Sex and its contemporaries resist those flat archetypes. These are stories told by and for women who have lived long enough to know that sexuality is not a linear journey but a layered, evolving terrain. That desire can deepen with age, not diminish. That intimacy need not be goal-oriented, and that control over one’s body, time, or pain can be the most powerful aphrodisiac of all. Dying for Sex isn’t just a story of sex positivity; it’s a quiet act of rebellion. Against illness, against invisibility, against the idea that female sexuality has an expiration date.

In the past, stories of women’s sexual awakenings were almost exclusively reserved for twentysomethings. (What else are your 20s for, culturally, if not a string of ill-advised hookups and humiliating lingerie?) But now, a wave of books, shows, and films is making the case that sexual self-discovery isn’t just for the young – and that it doesn’t have to involve a husband, or even a long-term partner. Sometimes it’s not about the other person at all.

Consider Babygirl, the Nicole Kidman movie that opens and ends with an orgasm – and not all of them are fake. At first glance, Romy (Kidman) seems like a parody of “having it all”: high-powered CEO, perfect family, chic silk blouses. But under the glossy surface, something’s rotting. Her life is perfectly automated – and perfectly dead inside. Until she meets a much younger intern and begins an affair with elements of power exchange. In a cheap motel room, on her stomach and growling like an animal, she finally touches something real. The sex is a portal, not a destination. A shedding of performance. A radical act of presence.

This isn’t just sexual fantasy, it’s a philosophical inquiry. What happens when women step outside the roles they’ve been taught to perform: good wife, good mother, good (but not too good) girl? What happens when sex isn’t about desirability but desire? It’s this same question that animates All Fours, Miranda July’s autofictional novel about a perimenopausal woman who leaves her family for a roadside motel and a deeply inconvenient obsession with a younger man. She doesn’t want a new life, exactly – she just wants to feel something unexpected. Something unscripted. As she puts it: “What if reinvention isn’t about getting younger, but about becoming more specific?”

To dismiss stories like Babygirl or Dying for Sex as simply reckless or exhibitionist is to miss the point entirely. Conservative critics like Kat Rosenfield, writing in The Free Press, have lamented what they see as a growing genre of media featuring women in their forties and fifties on “relentless, even reckless pursuits of sexual fulfilment.” She describes this turn as self-indulgent, prioritising “pleasure over partnership” and painting sex as a “solitary enterprise.” But the real fantasy here isn’t the sex – it’s the insistence that heterosexual marriage is the gold standard of intimacy and human connection, a claim both statistically and narratively shaky.

What Dying for Sex makes beautifully clear – and what Babygirl tries to gesture toward, if not always successfully – is that sex, even wild, even kinky, even deeply weird sex, can be a form of healing. It can be transformative. It can be how a person comes home to themselves, or learns to be touched again after years of being unseen. For Molly in Dying for Sex, her so-called “reckless” exploration was more emotionally honest than her entire marriage. These stories aren’t about throwing connection away – they’re about finding it in places previously deemed off-limits.

To portray sex as something older women do only for intimacy-within-marriage is to erase the real, complex, often radical work of self-reclamation. It’s also, frankly, boring. Babygirl may not always hit the emotional depths it gestures toward, but it dares to position a woman over forty at the centre of her own desire, not as comic relief or cautionary tale, but as protagonist. And that alone feels quietly revolutionary.

There’s still plenty of gloss in these stories. In most, the women are white, slim, and conventionally beautiful. But the cultural movement they’re part of feels real. We’re finally seeing stories that decouple sex from youth, desirability from reproduction, and womanhood from sacrifice. In Babygirl, Romy doesn’t end up with her younger lover. That’s not the point. The happy ending is hers alone. And in Dying for Sex, pleasure isn’t a last-ditch distraction from death – it’s a reclamation of life. Maybe that’s what these stories are really about. Not about sex, per se, but about freedom. To want things. To change. To not be finished yet. And that’s the most radical fantasy of all.